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After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team.

I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me!

Silicon Valley is full of advice and it frequently comes from people who have little experience on the subject matter. A popular topic surrounds hiring and terminations with the king catch phrase being: “Hire Fast, Fire Fast.” To me, what that usually means is lack of diligence, thought, communication and courage.

When hiring people love going with their gut feel, often with disastrous results. There is an obvious subject of diversity of thought, appearance and background. When thinking “fast” you are probably hiring people like yourself because humans quickly react to people who they believe are in their tribe.

A startup that lacks the resources of a big company often becomes so desperate to get technical staff that when a decent candidate comes along, excitement ensues and the employer doesn't slow down to put them through a more rigorous hiring process.

I highly encourage technical founders and engineering executives to write out their precise hiring process. Of course, y…

Software development involves a great deal of collaboration. One of the most basic blocks of collaboration on a software development team is a code review. There have been many different ways of doing code reviews over time, some of this has been dictated by the tools available. Git and online source collaboration tools created a set of best practices that are worthwhile of adopting on any team.

About a month ago I have looked at various articles about how to best create a Pull Request (PR) and do a code review and the attached presentation is the result of this research. The presentation can help you guide your team and develop a set of collaboration practices that works for your particular situation.

It’s good to start out with why to seek a code review. Having clarity about your intentions helps you guide the person helping you with code reviews and also to manage your expectations about you can get out of the code review. The reasons for seeking a code review are generally …